Volvo Ocean Race - Three skippers give their perspective
by Sail-World.com on 4 May 2015
From the drone: May 2, 2015. Leg 6 to Newport onboard Dongfeng Race Team. Day 13. If you look close you can see Azzam on the horizon, 5nm back. Sam Greenfield/Dongfeng Race Team/Volvo Ocean Race
Three of the Volvo Ocean Race skippers give their perspective on the the current state of a very close match race, once again.
Currently less than 20nm separates the first five boats, with the boats astern making gains on the lead boat Abu Dhabi.
Ian Walker, skipper Abu Dhabi : Double Olympic medalist, America's Cup campaigner and now on his third Volvo Ocean Race:
A brief summary of what lies ahead for you!
Right now we can see the whole fleet except SCA. The weather looks pretty clear ahead apart from 4 or 5 major stumbling blocks.
1. In 350 miles time we have to cross a decaying front that is likely to have no wind. This could mean the whole fleet compressing
2. We have to sail around another high pressure centred North of Bermuda and manage the shift v pressure conundrum of how close to cut the centre
3. Will any routes go far enough west to bring the Gulf stream into play? Could be a good possible option for a backmarker / risk taker
4. There is an increasing likelihood of very little wind in the last hundred miles to Newport when anything could happen!
5. We still have 1250 miles of sailing in predominantly light / medium wind when boatspeed as always will be important
Several things are clear to me.
1. This will be a close finish
2. Any of the boats (and I include SCA if they don’t get trapped by expanding light winds behind) could still be in with a chance of winning this leg
Enjoy,
Ian
Charles Caudrelier skipper of Donfeng Race Team, previously crewed on the 2011-12 race winner Groupama
Incredible this Volvo Ocean Race.
Another exceptional leg of this edition. 13 days of racing, 4300 miles raced and four of us are in sight of each other. Yesterday our tracks crossed again and off we went again on a speed test. Glued to the AIS system at the chart table, we feed the speed of our competitors to the guys on deck. According to the clouds and narrow corridors of wind, we have good and bad phases. It grinds down the nerves!
The one-design has totally changed the regatta on the water. The fact to have very similar speeds of course explains a big part of why the gaps are so small. But it's also clear that everyone is looking to control the other. The uncertain weather outlook over the previous days has forced us to stay together.
Last night I was bouncing around the chart table convinced that the whole fleet was too far south, and anyone daring to gybe to the north could make a big gain. No one moved. With a bit of audacity we finally decided to gybe. After 20 minutes on starboard gybe we couldn’t take it anymore and gybed back to our friends. This morning the gain was however quite significant, more than 5 miles on Brunel and 10 on Abu Dhabi.
Unfortunately this small lead will melt away this afternoon. In front of us is a huge cold front that we must cross, along with a full 180-degree rotation of the wind. A wall to climb over with very little wind and random squalls. Maybe the leg will be decided here. The first to cross and touch the new wind could really get away.
Sam Davies, skipper of womens crew Team SCA, twice around the world singlehanded sailor.
Compared to the last two legs, this leg is much less hectic in many ways: manoeuvres (and therefore disturbed off-watches), conditions (less physical, less extreme), climate (warmer, drier.) This has given us the opportunity to get a bit more rest in our off watches and, believe me, we need it. I feel like the last seven months of racing is taking its toll on my body and I am trying to play catch-up in order to be able to do my job properly. I was planning to write this blog about 10 days ago and just have not found a single minute to spare. (Well, I have managed to write three short emails home to get news from Ruben and Romain.)
This racing is a crazy life!
As this leg progresses I get the feeling that we are learning and improving more than ever, both in the way we work together as a team and also in our technical performance (boatspeed, strategy etc), just in my last watch this morning we were discussing how we wished we knew everything we know now and how differently we would have sailed in Legs 1 and 2 if we were to go back and do them now… but also in more short term we are still astounded at how much we have learnt in just the last four days. I can feel a different vibe in our crew, more confident, more relaxed, in tune with the boat and each other. It is amazing how much we are changing.
We have sailed nearly 5,000 miles, we spent the first week in the lead group, and now the leaders are only 50 miles away. Frustrating as it is to lose some miles in the last week we do recognise that this is our best leg yet… With more than 1,000 miles to go we know that there are still opportunities and we also know that we are sailing better than ever, this is a crew with a mission.
Sometimes learning by our mistakes can be frustrating, we need to be careful to learn from them but not dwell on them…. I have put a little message up in the nav station that has forbidden 'hindsight', 'negative thoughts', and 'pessimism' from the little area around the chart table… we need all the energy we've got to go forward and catch the others and I reckoned that sometimes frustration is a waste of time. The message is still here in front of me, someone (with a sense of humor and a red pen) has helpfully added 'farting' to the list. In fact, I need to trace who has a red pen because the last time someone drew a moustache on my face (Leg 5) when I was asleep (with a indelible marker) it was a red pen too…. there is a link there to find the culprit…….
So, yes, despite the intensity of our task, and our motivation to perform, we do keep a sense of humor on board. The latest is to try to beat the frustrations of our Sargasso 'clingons' that have been killing us for the last four days… no matter what we do, there is always more and more weed wrapping itself around our keel, rudders and propeller saildrive. We look for it with an endoscope through a special hole in the hull to check how much there is to evaluate when to do our 'capsize drill' to remove the weed and the best way of describing it is in 'Peppa Pigs' - i.e. 'we've got 2 Peppa Pig size clumps on the keel and a Peppa Pig on the saildrive' (this amount is enough to justify slowing down to remove it.) (sometimes this is followed by 'and half the Amazon on the rudder' when there are just too many Peppas to be able to have a proper reference.)
Any outsider hearing this would think we are going mad, but our newest crew member (female of course) is a small soft toy 'Peppa Pig', hence to us this reference for size (neither metric nor imperial) makes total sense to us all. Maybe we are going slightly mad????
Well, finally, congrats to Will and Kate for the royal baby, we are all happy to hear it is a girl, perhaps a future sailor?
Sam
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